Oregon Health Study

Posted on May 2, 2013 by admin

• Medicaid access increases use of care, study finds, By Annie Lowrey, May 1, 2013, New York Times: “Come January, millions of low-income adults will gain health insurance coverage through Medicaid in one of the farthest-reaching provisions of the Obama health care law. How will that change their finances, spending habits, use of available medical services and — most important — their health? New results from a landmark study, released on Wednesday in The New England Journal of Medicine, go a long way toward answering those questions. The study, called the Oregon Health Study, compares thousands of low-income people in Oregon who received access to Medicaid with an identical population that did not…”
• Medicaid has mixed record on improving health for poor, study says, By Noam N. Levey, May 1, 2013, Los Angeles Times: “As state leaders debate whether to expand their Medicaid programs next year under President Obama’s healthcare law, new research suggests the government insurance plan for the poor has only a mixed record of improving health. Medicaid beneficiaries are less likely than the uninsured to have catastrophic medical expenses and significantly less likely to suffer from depression, researchers at the Harvard School of Public Health and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology found…”
• Medicaid improved mental health for uninsured, By Ricardo Alonso-Zaldivar (AP), May 1, 2013, Chicago Sun-Times: “If you’re uninsured, getting on Medicaid clearly improves your mental health, but it doesn’t seem to make much difference in physical conditions such as high blood pressure. The counterintuitive findings by researchers at Harvard and MIT, from an experiment involving low-income, able-bodied Oregonians, appear in Thursday’s New England Journal of Medicine. The study offers a twist for states weighing a major Medicaid expansion under President Barack Obama’s health care law, to serve a similar population of adults around the country…”